Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (review)

John Milton Cooper Jr., the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written what many will consider the last word on the League of Nations debate. Breaking the Heart of the World is a wide-ranging, exhaustively researched, and carefully argued study of the treaty debate. It is also judicious and fair-minded, as Cooper positions himself between those who view Wilson as a visionary victimized by the personal animosities and political ambitions of his critics, and those who have accused him of a messiah complex. On the one hand, Cooper praises Wilson as a "sensitive man who had glanced into the abyss that yawned ahead if people and nations did not mend their ways." He "should have won the League fight," Cooper concludes: "For all their decency and intelligence, Wilson's opponents were wrong. For all his flaws and missteps, Wilson was right" (433). On the other hand, he acknowledges that Wilson made a number of serious blunders, especially after his stroke. At that point, Cooper argues, Wilson "either should have stepped down—preferably voluntarily, perhaps provisionally—or should have been removed from office through the intercession of sympathetic colleagues" (3). Cooper's diagnoses of Wilson's health problems may seem a bit speculative, and at times he seems overly impressed with Wilson's eloquence. Overall, however, Breaking the Heart of the World remains a remarkable achievement, especially its analysis of the Senate debates.

After a first chapter on the origins of the League idea and Wilson's presentation of the Draft Covenant to the Paris peace conference on February 14, 1919, Cooper devotes a long chapter to the Senate round robin that forced Wilson to negotiate revisions in the treaty. The third chapter describes the "long, hot summer" that followed, when Wilson became the first president to present a treaty to the Senate in person. "The speech was a dud," Cooper admits. Yet in attributing Wilson's problems in that speech to "symptoms of the cardiovascular condition that would culminate in a stroke three months later," Cooper reveals his tendency to blame the president's health for his every rhetorical miscue. Cooper initially concedes that Wilson's "physical condition" was only "part of the problem," yet he mentions no other possible explanations and concludes: "Only impaired political judgment could explain this misstep" (119-21).

In the fourth chapter, Cooper evaluates the famous western tour, which ended with Wilson's collapse after his speech in Pueblo, Colorado. The "wonder of this speaking tour," Cooper argues, was "not that Wilson displayed short-comings but that he performed as well as he did" (159). Reflecting a curious tendency among historians to celebrate the more emotional, even demagogic speeches of the tour, Cooper proclaims Wilson's speeches in California "the best of the tour," among "the finest of his life" (179). Relating how Wilson accused his opponents of betraying all who had died in the war, Cooper concludes: "This was the rhetorical and emotional apogee of the speaking tour" (181). Cooper also praises Wilson's speech in Pueblo, apparently impressed by his maudlin story about visiting the American cemetery at Suresnes, France.

The remainder of the book—more than half of this 433-page narrative of the treaty debate—focuses on the Senate's consideration of the treaty. Picking up the narrative after Wilson's collapse in Pueblo, Cooper reviews the evidence of Wilson's incapacitation and devotes most of the next two chapters to the Senate's 89 votes on treaty-related matters between early October and November 19, 1919, when the Senate finally rejected the treaty both with and without reservations. Cooper devotes two more long chapters to the four months of additional Senate debate between November 19 and March 19...